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I haven't seen a guide around these parts, but have seen an awful lot of questions. How about I clear some marketing stuff up? Below I have created a small guide to provide users with the benefits and tips of marketing.

Table of Contents:

1. Social Networking
2. Marketing FAQ
3. Promotion
4. SEM and SEO
5. Paid Marketing
6. Conclusion

Part 1 Social Networking:

In our Web 2.0 time things are changing and advancing. The older version of social networking to let the world know about your product is over. Social Networking consists of a website that provides a community experience, not just a forum. Usually there is a place where you can advertise your website or product, in which case people register as members, kind of like myspace, but for us geeks better, since there's no predators, just spam . Here is a list of a few top level social networking websites:

Click here for the entire guide.

Creating a successful and potentially flourishing website is not a walk in the park. It does take time, hard work, and a lot of thought. A website can be compared to a child. If you want to raise it to be a good child then it has to develop. In order to do so many steps must be taken and patience must be acquired. You need to learn how to function a website, how to engineer it, how to optimize it, how to rank it, how to get members, how to get quality, how to create ideas, and more things are yet to come. Everything seems so monotonous doesn’t it? Well that is what it takes to be a top webmaster. Here are some guidelines that are helpful to follow, which are written by me.

Put your site in Web Directories, those are just like phonebooks but with use to your website. Find ones that have good Page Rank, which is ranked from 0 to 10. So a Page Rank 3 or higher will give you a decent backlink. Also to achieve a more eminence link there are more steps to follow. You have to find a website with a good niche; niche is defined in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world as a category in what your website falls into. Such as Google would have a Search Engine niche, MTV has a music and entertainment niche, Comedy Central has a comedian type of niche and so on and so forth. Next you have to do some research on the type of link you are receiving. This includes the four golden rules: pagerank, indexed pages, backlinks, and niche. It is mandatory if you want a quality link to find a website that has mastered those qualities. If you get a backlink that has a good PR but no indexed pages, and not the same niche, then there is not much use to it. If you have a backlink with indexed pages, but not the same niche and no pagerank, then it is not worth it. So it is necessary to find a website that has a link with those four qualities mentioned above. This is also helpful in the marketing world. People will try to sell links for a cheap price, and say they are quality, but without doing a background check (A good tool to use is Iwebtool) they might be just giving a poor link for a cheap price. I call those wasted links, they have little or no effect on your SEO. I bought quite a few of them, and had experience, and I now know which links are quality. Also it is always better to find a website that has less outbound links as well.

Another excellent way to acquire good links is to put your website in your signature. If it is a good website with the 4 qualities mentioned; pagerank, indexed pages, backlinks, niche (not necessarily niche required for this one) then you should go ahead and put your website in your signature. I can’t stressed this enough, people tend to not realize the important of this. It is always good as well not to simple place the URL but to provide an Anchor Text. This is a keyword, and will help identify your website! Also if you can’t afford to buy a link, it is always a good idea to exchange links with partner website (remember to follow the four golden rules). Be sure to do a link exchange with a SEO friendly website, not a bad one.

It came to me that I saw a plethora of people trying to use Free Search Engine Submitters, well that will get you nothing. It is better to index yourself in those major search engines by having quality backlinks. Also submit a sitemap! Not many people are aware of this but if you go to google.com/webmasters you can find out how to submit a sitemap. Sitemap’s help Googlebot to crawl your website and have different pages analyzed and indexed. If you can’t figure it out be free to ask me or anyone else.

I know most of you want to learn how to drive traffic to your website. This is one of the most difficult and intricate parts of developing a master website. It is always a good first push start to alert you friends and people that you know about your website. Chances are this will help quite a lot. I had success using this as many of my top posters are personal friends. But you might want to stay away from those jocks and cheerleaders ; they probably won’t understand what a website is. Another good way to get a numerous amount of traffic is to do advertising. Aside from getting a link on a high SEO’ed website, try to get a link on a high traffic website. The only rule for this is have it related to your niche, the worst thing that could happen is having an Illegal Music Download site receiving traffic from a Government Justice website, it just doesn’t fit eh ? It is good to have a banner placed on high traffic websites. There are many different ways to advertise including; content creation, Myspace bulletins, banner advertising, Google Adwords, blog posts, signatures, and more.

Trade is always a good way to receive something. Especially links, anyone would want to have 50 posts on there forum for a monthly link on their high traffic, high PR, or highly indexed website. You can also trade many other things including links, posts, traffic, advertising, signatures, avatar space, and more.

I think the best way to receive traffic to your website is something that draws attention. Let’s take a look at some successful websites shall we? Digitalpoint has resourceful tools and a helpful community, Google has a massive search engine, Iwebtool has a plethora of SEO tools, Apple has the revolutionary iPod, AOL has the instant messenger and internet services, Youtube has video broadcasting, and there are more. If you have something that someone in the world likes, such as a videos, then a person will surely link to their website. I know on my Myspace I put certain videos that I like, and that is a plus for the video creator. Now it is up to YOU to find a unique specialty that attracts interest for your website. If someone likes something, chances are they introduce it to others, then they introduce it to others, and a chain of free advertising occurs. It is also best to get fresh content. Improve your site more and more all the time! Everyone loves this and so will you. It makes your website look clean, sophisticated, cool, attractive, and fresh, just like you want your child to be right?

Another crucial component needed is an excellent design. If your website has a simple and dull design then most people won’t want to visit your website. Your banner, logo, theme, and forum should look neat and attractive, and should be matching. You cannot throw of design, and it is complicated to find the right theme for you. You should stick to your website as well. Be devoted, and it will be devoted to you, hopefully your members will also be dedicated towards it. If you don’t care for your website, no one else will either.

I find it best to keep users entertained. The worst scenario is that users get bored, and this leads to leaving and finding another substitute website. On my website I have an arcade, a news section, videos, contests, a lottery, and more. Find an amazing idea that keeps members attached. When they get attached they want to post, and posting leads to activity, which is a forums best friend. Also have special groups, such as an Elite Members club, as I have on my website Fantasy PC. This makes users want to feel special, and therefore find a liking to your website. I also have a currency in which you can earn by posting. It is called FP Gold, instead of real money it is a fake currency on my forums. These can be earned by posting more, and can be used for graphic designs, services, forum posting, script creation, website help, contests, link sales, signature sales, advertising, and more.

Well, I covered as much as I could. As I said earlier, creating a thriving website is difficult, takes an amount of time and dedication, you even may have the chance you can be unsuccessful, which I hope shouldn’t happen. You probably noticed that I compared creating a website to raising a child. Even though I haven’t had any children myself as I am just a teen, I am pretty sure it is a pretty close comparison. You want your child to be successful and you have to develop him/her and put effort into it so if you keep to it, and learn and practice everything from my guide here to different guides, you can improve your website, to one day becoming a triumphant website.

During the launch of the Dev Network I tried to accumulate as many backlinks as possible for the pagerank update. Well after a long shift on the Pagerank Algorithm, Google finally released the Live Pagerank.

Somewhat unfortunately we turned out a PR2 on the homepage, even though it is better than a 0 it is not what we expected. I was hoping for a PR6. However back in the beginning of August end of July we did not know that Google was shifting the algo, so therefore I thought more paid links would be better. However, as it turns out this is not a good thing, so during the end of August and the September I tried to get more organic backlinks.

Even though it's not a PR6 I am not too upset because everyone else is not doing well either. John Chow has gone down to PR4 and actually my old blog went to PR3 so I would call this a success nonetheless.

I took a look at my backlinks for the Dev Network and it showed I had about 8,400 backlinks. Most of them are from PR2-6 and are related niche, I also have each and every anchor text for "developer" since that is what my goal is.

I actually was indexed for that keyword on the 1st or 2nd page more than once but then shortly after I was de indexed for the word. Let's hope I can stay on the first page some time.

So what have we learned from this?

> the Dev Network is a PR2

> Google has updated their Pagerank Algorithm

> Paid links are no longer recommend in the Pagerank industry

> Organic links are now favored and only accepted

> the Dev Network ranks and unranks for the term "Developer"

So the goals are to try to get a higher Pagerank, preferrably PR6, rank for the term "Developer", work on the new Design and fix bugs, get forums matching, etc. and just kick back and write articles and get things going!

If you're thinking about starting up a new website or even revamping the one you currently have, then look at some tips and advice on how to go about doing it

Goals

Even before you start hiring a designer to work on your website layout, you must first plan out what goals you want your website to complete. Keep a list of ideas written down from your designer and yourself to refer back to through the creation process. When everything is created, then you can look back on the list and see how well you had accomplished your goals.

When Developing your website, here are some questions you may want to ask yourself:

It is essential that you know exactly what your website will do before it ever goes live.

Structure of the Site

How will your website be organized and what will be the central theme. Don't try to be too fancy with the site, just make sure it is pleasant to the eyes and navigable for those who are not as familiar with the internet. Remember back to other websites that you have visited: It is obvious that plenty of time and work went into sites that are easily navigable.

Design of your site

The look and feel of your website really shows the intention and mood of your business to the public. It's essential to find a designer who can work with you to make your site resemble what your company's function is.

Research your competitors. Choose a few websites in your field and really study their design: Which features did you enjoy and which did you think were not efficient? The information you collect will develop your own website to meet your own intentions and show off your own style.
Make your website reflect yourself and know what you want, but don't put down any ideas that are offered, take them into consideration. Giving the designer a sort of creative control can morph your website to an even better product. Studies show that the design of a website is the number one most influenced factor with potential customers, no one is going to buy products from a site that looks boring and dull, and in general most people feel more comfortable buying products from professional sites: designers are highly skilled at creating the trustworthy looking site.

Send any logos/business cards to your designer to incorporate with the website. Mix them into your theme and keep them consistent.

Content

You may have a great theme and design to your site, but if there is no content, people are soon going to leave. Always update your site everyday with no information and content to keep bringing back loyal customers back.

Content doesn't have to be just text either, it can be new music, products, pictures, or even video games. The web contains a limitless amount of information and media to cater to any need that your website may need, experiment with content.

Content is near the top of the most important things for your website. Your website will most likely need content writers to prosper online or at least an editor that can find content. Most designers have worked with other content writers that they may be able to recommend. Make sure your theme matches with the content writers style or voice to keep up with consistency.

Production Values

The nice thing about your site is that you can enjoy it yourself and rate and comment on it, changes can be made to it at any time. Keep track of your stats to see how well certain pages perform against others and why. Just don't forget your original goal for your website, but let it shape and change to keep up with that goal. A website isn't a physical thing like a business card or a newsletter, it can change constantly and will most likely.

Marketing Techniques

Now that your amazing website is built, you have to make sure people come and see it.

• In order for your website to be listed on large sites such as Google or Yahoo, your designer will have to use descriptive words in your titles and other largely used keywords otherwise your work was all for nothing.
• Consider investing money into PPC (pay per click) ads.
• Some banners can be constructed to be featured on other sites that shows some brief words about your own website.
• Never forget to put your URL or website name on every single promotional card/flyer that you send out or banner. They may not click on the link to get to your site right away, but they may remember the URL for later use.

Maintenance on your Site

Once again, keep your content fresh to bring back other loyal customers, if it's left to get stale, others won't stop by anymore. Update photos, calendars, news stories, and others things like those to keep up your visitor count.

Maintaining your site will be the most important thing you can do for it, but you won't be able to do it until your website is operational and live. You have a few options on how to maintain your site after it is live, you can hire your designer to update it daily (which can cost a pretty penny) or you can create some sort of CMS (Content Management System).

I highly recommend you don't higher a designer. If it is up to him or her, they might not be able to be there to update content if they are on vacation or some sort of family problem. Your news could lag if they are not there because they are in Maui for vacation without a computer, that could cause some of your clients to leave. Just choose some type of CMS to work with. Besides, if you have a great designer, they're going to have plenty of clients to work with and won't have time to help you.

CMS's were created so that you could update your site without having to know a great deal of HTML or coding language. If you know how to work a word processor or a type of folder system, you'll be able to use a CMS. These systems let you do almost anything you want to do including changing the layout of your site, adding a blog, or basically anything. They are usually divided into different sections of your website for easy navigability.

Don't think that this means you can slack off and not learn some aspects of programming languages, if the CMS goes wrong how are you going to know how to fix it? It's best to learn some things about your website in case something does go wrong with your CMS. Talk to your designer to see if he or she can help you with your CMS if it ever goes haywire for no reason.

Has adding a forum to your site ever tickled your fancy? This article will hopefully tell you some of the pros and cons of owning a forum. It all depends on how much work you want to do.

Pros:

On some forums, they attract incredibly dedicative people. They'll stop by everyday to see if anyone has posted on their topics. They'll post all day long and really help promote the forum. This adds a great deal of free content on your site to attract more people! The forum can also show what an expert you are on the subject of your site or help you learn things you never knew before. The other nice things about forums are that you don't even need to run them. Just find a moderator who will keep a watch over everyone and you're all set to go off and work on other projects.

Cons:

Installation - Forums can extremely difficult to set-up. It takes a great deal of knowledge of programming and even worse, networking. Yet some companies have them already hosted and set up and all you need to do is set up the name of it and you're ready to go. ForumCo is a very reliable company and I use them all the time. They're extremely good at what they do. They also use PhpBB which is a nice forum program and they charge absolutely nothing (except you have to display ads, but those can be removed).

Starting Up - This is always a hard one. When people first arrive on your forum and see no posts, they're probably not going to want to post anything either. People want content right when they show up, something they can read through. You won't be able to do this with no posts, it's going to take some work. Ask some friends to start talking on the forums to attract some people. Or you can even pay people to start posting things, just to get stuff started.

Management - Your forum can really get away from you if you don't manage it properly. You're going to need to attract the good posters and weed out the flamers, but this can be a lot of work to do by yourself. There are those that love to post and moderate on forums, and these are the ones you should turn to if you need someone to run your forum while you are away.

Spam - Spam are one of the biggest problems you'll face. It's hard to tell who is a spammer until they post unrelated affiliate links on your site and you have to ban them. Don't worry about these too much until your forum really starts to grow.

Forums can be a great deal of hassle and a great deal of fun as well When starting your forum, just ask your friends to post messages on it, or hire some forum posters to just get the ball rolling. Do some advertisement and put some work into it. After a while everything should start coming together and hopefully your Forum can create its own momentum.

First things first, what is a Validated Website?

To put it in simplest terms, it's when your site is tested to make sure that it runs smoothly and fits with today's rigorous standards for the web. It uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to organize your content and fixes and ties up any loose ends you may have still on your site.

But in the end we have to have the WC3 tell us what the definition is, as they are the most prominent leaders of Validation, and I quote from their site!

"Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types. It serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language."

Accessibility

Not validating your site leaves it open for problems for any web browsers it was not made for (most likely with Opera, Netscape, or other low used browsers). Internet Explorer may fix these little problems and bugs but other browsers such as Opera may display the code as is, this could potentially be a problem. So pretty much, Validation fixes your code up nice and tidy so that (with maybe the exception of IE) people with browsers can enjoy your website the way you wanted them to!

Convenience

If you want to Validate your site, you're going to have to start using certain things like ALT tags on your images and photos. This helps individuals who have difficulty comprehending what they're seeing on the site, mostly for those who have difficulty navigating the internet in the first place. In a nutshell, Validation is what is going to help those who do, in fact, have learning disabilities or simply a tough time with the web. Although having a Validated website might not fix all your Accessibility problems, it sure does help to fix them. Others will thank you as well. There's nothing worse than going somewhere that can't cater to your needs.

Search Engine Optimization

Any website that is clean from bugs and errors is also more easily found by large search engines such as Yahoo or Google. So if you clean up your site, it will be more easily found and thus that means more customers/viewers. Another point about getting your site validated is that, sometimes the search engine could be focusing on parts of your site that aren't quite as developed as the rest which can result in you losing customers since it may just focus in on your TOS and not your home page.

Quicker Page Loading

Typical Websites had always used ungodly amounts of tables to organize the content and even the structure of the site. So the purpose of CSS takes away the tables needed to manage the content and manages it alone without even having to bother with the structure of the site, which speeds up the loading time for any site by seconds. It also takes care of any lose coding that the browser may have problems with, freeing up extra time as well.

How can I validate?

What you're going to want to do first is check your own site to see if it needs Validation (see the steps down below).

Next, you're going to need to decide whether or not your website really needs Validation or not. But don't forget that now there is a legal factor you must obey in making your site accessible.

Finally, check out some SEO companies to see if they'll help you in finishing off your validation and tying up loose ends. It's not unheard of to just remake an entire new site, rather than redoing the one you've already made. This isn't a problem though, perhaps this is just what your aging site needs.

How to validate your website using Validation Tools:

1. Go to the W3C website and look for the Validator tool.
2. Fill out the options and click submit.
3. If your site is validated, sit back and watch the traffic flow.

Search Engine Friendly URL's are an advanced part of SEO. By using Apache mod_rewrite we can use this to change numbered URL's to simple keyword URL's that are better for SERP's.

1. Background of Mod Rewrite

In the starting days of the Web, each site was made up of one file made out of HTML which would consist of one page. It was very easy to move around sites and links as each page was a self contained file.

The following developments were CGI scripts to server dynamic content. This changed to URLs such as:

http://www.sample.net/cgi-bin/page.cgi
http://www.sample.net/cgi-bin/script...l1&param2=val2

The GET parameters could be incorporated into the URI and cleaned up a little:

http://www.sample.net/cgi-bin/script/param1/param2

Then scripting languages came trotting along that allowed pages to be dynamic without the necessity of the pages to sit in one directory:

http://www.sample.net/script.php?par...l1&param2=val2
http://www.sample.net/script/param1/param2

The second example in this scenario would use in most cases Content Negotiation to recognize the address in the example as a call to the script, with the what was left of the address (/param1/param2) obtainable as an environment variable.

Search engines started to emerge like Google, Yahoo, and MSN that required everything to be "indexable" by the search engine spiders such as Googlebot and other programs like Slurp. The ultimate ideal was to make all the sites look like they were composed of individual pages in order to bump up the hits that were made with the bot.

The following samples will show how to do this process using URLs for complex dynamic content.

2. Search Friendly URL's

The most popular part of a site is usually the News section database. These would usually be brought up as:

http://www.sample.net/news.php?id=20050901

(a request to the news.php script passing one GET parameter which shows which item to display)

Now the RewriteRule shows up for the first time:

RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]+) /news.php?id=$1

• IF the request starts with news/ followed by some digits or only one.
• THEN call the news.php script with the exact id set up to those digits.

RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]+) /scripts/news.php?id=$1

RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]{8}) /scripts/news.php?id=$1

RewriteRule ^news/([0-9]{8})\.html$ /scripts/news.php?id=$1

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=([0-9]+) RewriteRule ^news\.php /news/%1.html? [R=301,L]

• IF the sring starts with id=(1 to infinity digits)
• AND a request is put out for /news.php
• THEN redirect (301) to a search-engine-friendly URL sans query string

RewriteRule ^book/([0-9]+)\.html /scripts/book.html?id=$1&%{QUERY_STRING}

RewriteRule ^book/([0-9]+)\.html /scripts/book.html?id=$1 [QSA]

RewriteRule ^book/([0-9]+)\.html /showbook.php?id=$1

Java is one of the most popular programming languages on the web. It has created an immense background with programmers and users, outlined with its programming aspects, and most likely in it innovative round trip use of writing one program and letting it be used from anywhere on the internet. Java has become a great enterprise for computer users and has many qualities that make it subtle. The creators of Java are originally Sun Microsystems, whom which affirm that Java is object oriented, dynamic, interpreted, safe, portable, and simple. Java can be seen on a wide variety of programs and is used to its advantage over other programming languages. Below are some significant advantages:

• Java doesn’t have a platform- This allows you to easily move from one computer system to another. Java has the ability work on any system which is important for World Wide Web software.

• Java is like learning the ABCs- Ok, Java is not that easy, but you get the point it’s much easier to learn than other programming languages. A lot of times it serves as a stepping stone for other programming languages.

• Java has high security- This is why the language, runtime environment, and other features were developed with security measures in place.

• Java is reliable- Java has many systems that check for errors and problems that show up during execution. Many other languages don’t offer this kind of service.

• Java is multithreaded- Being multithreaded, Java can perform several tasks at once. Java has easy to use multithreaded programming while in other languages you would have to follow procedures to be able to use multithreading.

• Java is distributed- Distributed computing is easy with Java. It has networking capability that is incorporated in it.

If you’ve been spending a lot of time in the net, you might have already heard about the acronyms AJAX and SEO. If not, continue reading this article and learn a few things about the latest buzz in information technology and online marketing.

What is AJAX? AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is the latest programming technique used by webmasters to build interactive websites. What makes it different from other programming applications? Through AJAX programming, a web page can download a lot faster than a typical site. How is it possible? AJAX enables a site to exchange small packets of data direct from the server so that the next time the page is refreshed, some of the data needed have already been downloaded. This means faster and more convenient surfing for internet users.

One example of a website that makes use of the AJAX application is Google Maps. Other travel related websites are also implementing this technology to give their customers a better surfing experience when visiting their sites. Apart from faster loading, AJAX application also enhances a website’s graphics and visuals.

Despite these advantages, AJAX poses a challenge with regards to a website’s Search Engine Optmization (SEO). This is where the conflict comes in. Unfortunately, search engines today are not able to read content using AJAX application as they do with content using an HTML program. As you can see, this presents a big problem to a website that wishes to gain web traffic and search engine ranking. Obviously, more web traffic and a higher search engine rank is what every website is aiming for.

As of now, there is not much webmasters can do but to use AJAX application only in areas that are most needed for the site. Perhaps it will not take long before search engines are enhanced and will be able to read website content that uses AJAX programming. Until then, webmasters can only wait for improvement or for a better web application to come along.

As you look around your probably wondering what happened to the old Dev Network. Well, we made some major changes and now we have a Web 2.0 Design. We are still in the development process, so please point out any bugs or issues that you may find. We will try to get everything functional as soon as possible, and we are working on more than just a homepage design.

You may also be concerned about the Community section, as of now we are working on the User Interface.